I’m talking about germaphobia/mysophobia.
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It’s… not an option. I live in a slum in Vietnam. This is actually quite nice in many ways, it is overall quiet and safe! However, flooding, weird plumbing, humidity, and general low-level chaos make it impossible to keep particularly clean.
It would be like being afraid of air.
Like, I used to be afraid of spiders. Then I immigrated here and spiders were just common enough that after a period of discomfort I just had to give up and accept them.
Thanks for sharing! How come you moved to Vietnam? Where were you living before?
Canada. I finished my MSc. at the exact moment a government restructure eliminated essentially all the jobs in my field.
So there was a big temptation to just sell all my worldly possessions, move to a growth market, start a company, and just work really hard. I checked out China, but ended up choosing Vietnam because it was in an earlier stage of development, the language used Latin characters (so I didn’t become functionally illiterate), and there was a clearer framework for properly sorting out my immigration paperwork.
A lot of other foreigners I knew early on laughed at me for sorting out that last item. About four fifths of them have been booted out, the rest died. I am left.
I’m not great at running a business, I made many mistakes. Heck, I lost every dime to my name at the worst of it (and nearly died of cholera besides). It worked out in the end, I’m happily married, have achieved reasonable cultural integration, I’ll own a home and probably retire into volunteer work in my mid 40s. However I’d classify the journey as acutely distressing. Some of the things I’ve experienced haunt me, but I think I can live with that.
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It’s true, although some of those things make me rather sad. Climate change is one – I’m moving to a coastal city in a few years and as I’m designing a home, I’m realizing that everyone that didn’t have the money to build with climate change in mind is going to live a hard life. Just south in Quảng Nam it’s already getting quite bad.
In the slum where I live now (in HCMC), life is easy and most people do not work full time (I think 3-4 people on my street have what you would recognize as a ‘job’). However, they will be priced out of their homes within a generation, there are no words I can say to help them, and the cause is company owners like me seizing the lion’s share of the country’s growth (although admittedly I work a lot more than they do).
At least for the moment they lead rich and full lives with family and friends, a brief moment in the sun – but they’ve sold their children’s future for the present without realizing it.
Not much. I had extensive courses on microbiology during uni. Generally the stuff you find at home or in nature (northen hemisphere temperate climates) is pretty tame and well avoidable.
As long as you wash your hand before eating, properly wash and heat sensitive food, and wash out and desinfact open wounds you are good to go.
Only thing i am concerned with is boreolosis or rabies from animals, but there you just gotta go to a doctor in time, if you suspect a transmission.
I understand though that this is the approach of someone with a healthy immune system, who never got more than a few days of shits from eating spoiled food occasionally.
I had extensive courses on microbiology during uni.
It’s not a perfect correlation, but I find most germophobes haven’t taken microbiology, or even regular biology. One of those ignorance == fear things, I think.
As far as the “contamination” language goes, people interested in the purity vs contamination dynamic may want to check out Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. It’s imperfect but has real explanatory value, IMO.
I have the feeling for a lot of MINT topics lack of knowledge creates a stronger emotional response, both positive or negative.
Do you mean vs contamination vs purity that “99% pure” is considered as good whereas “1 % contamination” is considered as bad? These kind of number examples were given in “thinking fast, thinking slow” to illustrate the fallability of number interpretation and the general lack of statistical intuition in humans.
Do you mean vs contamination vs purity that “99% pure” is considered as good
A moral/social judgement that The Other (out-group) is dirty, filthy, unclean, disease-ridden, gross, etc. Haidt suggests that is a distinction that aligns with a particular political leaning. It rings true to me (having been both in and out of that political group).
Haidt uses some novel examples in the book that make it worth the read for that if nothing else.
Not at all. Germs make you stronger.
My dad would frequently trot out “You’ll eat a peck o’ dirt before you die.” - where peck would be the UK version of the volumetric measure: a little over 9 ltrs.
He had a very laid back approach to contamination due to his old-school farming background. I had a rather more strict approach when young but, with age, I have become much more relaxed and do use the phrase myself at times.
I’ll eat a chicken nugget off the floor, but not lunchmeat.
If someone is sick, I’ll try to avoid touching them or getting in their face.
I avoid public hand rails and will open bathroom doors with a paper towel.
I’m not afraid of getting sick, but I’ll avoid it if I can readily do so.
The year of quarantine, I didn’t get sick, I like that a lot.
I am a healthcare professional with some public health and sanitation training and worked/traveled in Africa, Asia quite a lot, especially in the lesser known destinatios. So for regular life? Not much. I do adhere to basic sanitary rules (cook it,peel it or leave it) and make sure the water I use is clear when I am in these areas. But otherwise just the normal stuff like washing your produce before eating it, washing your hands after having a leak,etc. In my daily life it is rather unlikely to come in contact with the really nasty shit. (okay, only when you work with raw chicken…that stuff is nasty)
But work-wise? I am an extremist in that regard. I still wear a mask when seeing patients (more out of fear that I might infect them unknowingly), I absolutely desinfect my hands as often as required, I adhere to sanitation rules (e.g. for putting in iVs) religiously and make my students do the same. And when I am a patient I absolutely make sure that staff does the same when treating me.
The reason for that is quite simple: I saw too many hospital acquired infections and had a minor one myself. And that is unnecessary - and the stuff you get there is the one to truely fear. That will fuck you up badly.
Even though I’m a raging hypochondriac, I am not a germophobe. Funny how that works.
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I consider myself a rather hygienic person. Wash my hands perhaps more often than I should. But I’m not exactly stressed when I don’t, partly because I know perfect hygiene isn’t best for your health either. I’m just very conscious about it, especially when preparing food for somebody else.
More now than I did two weeks ago. I just recovered from a bout of Typhoid Fever / mystery bacterial infection in Cambodia.
I avoid it a fair amount. I won’t eat anything sticky that I’ve dropped, I try to avoid touching hand rails and door knobs. I’ll dodge people that are coughing or sneezing, especially if they’re children. I’m also very peculiar about eating food from potlucks made by people I don’t know.
I don’t care. The way I see it, it strengthens my immune system to be exposed to some germs once in a while
Probably not enough
Thought you were talking about Facebook Threads for a second XD
